the dangers of electronic voting

When you cast your ballot in Hinds County, Mississippi, you may have touched a screen instead of pulling a lever or punching a card. If you were to stop and talk with the poll workers and election officials, they would share with you the miracle these machines represent. Protected by “smart cards” and “security seals,” the votes cast are stored in the machine and automatically tabulated when the machines are returned to the vote counting room.

This change comes at an incredible cost. Because the only method of counting the vote is to rely on the accuracy of the information the machine provides, our electoral process is at the mercy of the men and women who program the machines. As we saw during the primary elections, even getting the appropriate names on the ballots proved to be difficult.

Voters in my precinct must return to recast their ballots after a recent primary election because the machines reported more votes than voters, which is the only type of fraud that can be detected with these machines. Actual manipulation of the votes is entirely possible to do, but completely impossible to detect.

In a fully electronic voting machine, it is impossible for the voter to verify that the ballot they cast actually corresponds to the vote that was recorded, transmitted, and tabulated.  A malicious programmer or other party could modify the software on each individual device, or the software used to aggregate the totals from all the machines.

At the moment, the only method of ensuring the accuracy of the vote is by comparing the number of ballots cast with the number of voters who signed in. A recount would be impossible. Without a physical audit trail, there is nothing to count again.

No electronic voting system conforms or has submitted itself to even the lowest levels of government or international computer security standards. These standards, which protect your banking transactions and even the alarm system in your home, ensure that the code controlling the system performs properly. The Federal Election Commission does review electronic voting machines, but their standards fall far short of those required by Congress in the Congressional Computer Security Act of 1987 to assure computer security.

There are no controls over the technicians and programmers who work on these machines. While foreigners and felons aren’t allowed to vote, there is no process to keep them from designing our election system.

There are no standards for the display of the ballot. The format used may be even more confusing than other balloting methods. The system used in Hinds County, for example, shows a screen filled with blinking boxes, which is quite confusing. There are also no standards for the way the ballots work.  When I selected a candidate only to have the candidate below selected, I couldn’t change the selection by picking the candidate I desired. I had to press the incorrect candidate again, and then press the correct one.

Computer security experts like Dr. Rebecca Mercuri, Beverly Harris, and Dr. Aviel Rubin have questioned many more electronic voting issues. To date, the only response from Diebold, a major manufacturer in the electronic voting industry, has not addressed the questions raised but only attacked the code these researchers were able to review as “outdated”.

The vendors of these products have made every possible attempt to exclude security experts who question the relaibility of self-auditing electronic voting machines from performing a proper review of the strengths and weaknesses of each individual system. For companies who are unable to even secure their own computer systems this need not be a suprise. It is, however, quite disappointing.

Instead of examining the problems that have been discussed with electronic voting machines, as other states have done, Secretary of State Eric Clark would like Mississippi to charge full steam into untested and insecure electronic machines.

We, as voters, should not stand by and allow our electoral process to be further corrupted.  While there are always vulnerabilities in elections, we should choose solutions that minimize the risk, not hide it from us altogether. Only a fully transparent voting system will provide security, reliability, and accuracy in Mississippi elections.

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